A Not-so-Absurd Analogy

Dec 06, 2019

By Lisa Laczynski

Imagine the following scenario. You’re an iPhone owner. You paid for the latest version with all the bells and whistles, and now you need navigation to get somewhere. There’s a native iPhone navigation application that’s got pretty much everything you need, but you decide to purchase a separate Garmin GPS Android-based navigation device. You now have a separate device in addition to your iPhone that you bring with you to provide the same functionality as the native navigation app on your iPhone.

Now, maybe you have a good reason for wanting the Garmin Android based device. Maybe you’re single and the Garmin navigation system has a feature which shows you every single person within a 2-mile radius at all times. Maybe the Garmin also enables you to text with your deceased beloved grandmother. Or maybe it provides you the closing stock prices of your favorite companies…one day in the future. Any one of these or a number of other fantastical features would, without question, justify the purchase of a separate device just for the navigation application.

But absent science fiction-esqe functionality, purchasing a separate device for an application already available on your existing iPhone would be irrational. It would never happen, right?

Believe it or not, we do see it…well, not exactly, but a directly analogous purchase decision, nonetheless.

ServiceNow just released it’s latest quarterly results, and it added nearly 800 new customers, bringing its total customer base to about 6,000. That’s 6,000 commercial, enterprise, healthcare, state or government organizations that have invested in the ServiceNow platform. Now, the total number of Nuvolo customers is not a number we share publicly, but let’s just say it’s less than 6,000.

Since we’re the only natively built facilities and space management application on the ServiceNow platform, that means that the vast majority of ServiceNow customers are using something other than Nuvolo to manage their facilities and space operations. Put another way, and in keeping with our absurd scenario, the vast majority of ServiceNow customers are using a separate “device” to run their facilities operations.

To be serious for a moment, a ServiceNow shop running its facilities operation with non-native facilities management software is almost as silly as buying a separate system to run a single application. A separate infrastructure – accompanied by predictable licensing and hosting fees – is required. Non-native facilities applications don’t exchange data directly with other ServiceNow applications like ITSM, Security Operations, or HR Service Delivery. Non-native facilities products can’t deliver ServiceNow-native attributes like easily configurable forms and workflows, user-built reports and analytics, or native mobile applications.

Of course, there may be perfectly good reasons for ServiceNow customers to use a non-native facilities management product…